In Sickness and in Health

By Susann Cokal

Jan. 17, 2014

Nancy Horan’s first novel, “Loving Frank,” explored the tangled personal life of Frank Lloyd Wright. Now, in her second, she takes a deep, long look at the intimate history of yet another creative man. This time, the action is viewed from two perspectives — those of Robert Louis Stevenson and (even more so) of his American wife, Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne, who hopes to be a painter or a writer herself. “Under the Wide and Starry Sky” is at once a classic artistic bildungsroman and a retort to the genre, a novel that shows how love and marriage can simultaneously offer inspiration and encumbrance, especially when the more successful partner believes that, as far as artists go, “a family could tolerate only one.” The Stevensons’ story is full of morbidity and sacrifice, chronicling losses and gains — and, of course, the writing of classics like “Treasure Island,” “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” and “Kidnapped,” none of which, Horan suggests, would have been possible without Fanny Stevenson’s careful nurturing of her husband.

The early chapters provide a stirring overture, with enough lyrical emotion and fervent aspiration to satisfy even a 19th-­century reader. Dusky-skinned, dashing and curvaceous, 35-year-old Fanny is often mistaken for an “exotic,” her dark eyes “full of sex.” In 1875, she travels with her three children from California to Europe so she and her daughter can study drawing and painting — and elude the shame caused by her loutish first husband’s multiple affairs. But in Paris, art lessons fade in importance as one of Fanny’s two young sons gradually succumbs to a horrible and lingering disease, diagnosed as “scrofulous consumption.”

In mourning, Fanny retreats to Grez-sur-Loing, a bohemian artists’ colony in the French countryside where she and her two remaining children can rebuild their health and spirits with plein air painting. There Louis, as he prefers to be called, first appears, having canoed his way from Antwerp to Paris in an effort to strengthen his lungs. For the young Scottish lawyer, it’s love at first sight, even though Fanny is almost 11 years his senior. Louis’s affliction — variously described as tuberculosis, chronic pneumonia or bronchitis — has reduced him to skin and bones, though in good times he’s flamboyantly “giddy with life.” He and Fanny become lovers and, back in Paris, patient and nurse.

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Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne, an American, married Robert Louis Stevenson in 1880.CreditPhotograph of Robert Louis Stevenson from Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Good sex and foul illness will continue to define their relationship. Fanny is “the most passionate woman” Louis has ever encountered, “leading, following, losing herself in trancelike forgetfulness.” But she shocks him by returning to her unhappy marriage, only to end up languishing in California with “brain fever.” Though ill himself, Louis rushes there to woo her back, composing a poem on the train: “Under the wide and starry sky, / Dig the grave and let me lie.”

Mercifully, her health returns, and the skies do get wider, the stars brighter. Once Fanny is divorced, she and Louis seek a cure for him in a peripatetic marriage. Switzerland, upstate New York, Australia and Samoa are just some of their stops. The housekeeping is occasionally offbeat — at times, the Stevensons occupy an abandoned miner’s cabin, a hired yacht and a freighter in the Gilbert Islands. While Fanny makes homes and tends sickbeds, Louis makes stories. “A chronic invalid,” he explains, “has but one thought about his identity: He doesn’t want to be a sick man.” But, he adds, he projects himself into the realm of health to explore human nature because “writers should find out where joy resides and give it a voice.”

The novel’s most fascinating chapters show the couple’s interactions as Louis composes some of the 19th century’s best-known works, with Fanny providing commentary. Not just a nursemaid, she is crucial to his artistic formation and growth. Louis works frenziedly through bouts of sickness to produce prodigious stacks of pages, occasionally burning them if Fanny, his “critic on the hearth,” finds them wanting. She persuades him to make Dr. Jekyll both good and bad, rather than pure evil, as Louis had first written. In a similar fashion, her devotion to Louis in illness seems both heroic and damaging, since she enables him to keep producing at a pace that no doubt endangers his health. The question, as always, is how much an artist and those around him should suffer for the sake of the work.

As his fame grows, Louis demonstrates an increasing lack of generosity, an inability to appreciate Fanny’s own talents, and she finds herself more given to brooding, clinging to hurt feelings. Fanny, Louis believes, may be a fine reader but she is not herself a creator; he scornfully rejects her desire to be considered an artist. One of the few bits of writing that appears in her own name is met by Louis’s friends with accusations of plagiarism. It’s hard not to wonder if Fanny’s physical ailments arise from thwarted creativity rather than “brain fever.” Horan manages, admirably, not to make this judgment overt, even as she lays bare Fanny’s pain. And she makes clear that there is still intermittent joy amid the troubles in the Stevenson marriage.

As the years and miles accumulate, the intensity of Horan’s narrative diminishes, its sharp focus yielding to a scattershot sampling of thoughts and events depicting Fanny and Louis in midlife. Louis interests himself perhaps too much in political causes; his writing and health suffer. Fanny loses her looks and grows more and more eccentric. The historical Fanny Stevenson’s most memorable accomplishment may have been her ability to make a home almost anywhere. In reclaiming her as a fictional character, Horan reminds us that art is often the result of many talents, deployed in many ways.